How fragile is our home planet? One equation gives the incredible amount of energy that would literally be needed to do this. (Symbolic image, source: Anton Balazh – adobe.stock.com)
If you look at the world today, there are many scenarios of how life on Earth could be destroyed: a major extinction of species, the advancing climate crisis or a global nuclear war.
But what would it take to destroy the earth itself?
The knowledge magazine Spektrum dealt with this abstract idea. Star Wars fans will immediately think of the Death Star at this point, but this case can also be solved mathematically without science fiction: thanks to the Equation of gravitational binding energy.
That’s how much power it takes to destroy our earth
So what would it take to tear the Earth apart? The knowledge magazine spectrum used the following equation for the calculation in his column of March 17, 2024:
EG = (3G x M²) / 5R
In Europe: G stands for the gravitational constant, M for the mass of the Earth and R for the radius of the Earth. So 3 x the gravitational constant times the mass of the Earth squared in the numerator and 5 times the radius of the Earth in the denominator of the fraction.
The result: According to the spectrum, the equation spits out a gigantic number: 200 quintillion joules. This is a number with 30 trailing zeros. But what does the result tell us?
It corresponds to the energy that is necessary if you want to move the components of a body that are held together by gravitational force infinitely far apart.
Florian Freistetter, knowledge magazine Spektrum
In other words, this is the amount of energy required to completely pulverize our earth.
A crazy comparison: According to the spectrum, this corresponds to about one-sixtieth of the energy that the sun produces annually.
Death Star versus Earth: Would the Empire be able to destroy our planet?
As a Star Wars fan, you have to ask yourself this question: Could the gigantic ball of death destroy our Earth like it did Leia Organa’s home planet? To do this, we leave the world of logical mathematics and move into the area of fan fiction.
What we know: The Death Star destroyed the planet Alderaan in Star Wars Episode IV. According to the fansite Jedipedia Alderaan had a radius of 12,500 km. Our Earth is similar in size: its diameter is 12,742 km.
So the question can be answered with a theoretical yes – at least if the Death Star can generate more energy to compensate for this difference (242 km extra in diameter).
So if one day we expand our exploration of space, it might not be a bad idea to consider starting our own Jedi Order…
Worth seeing: All Star Wars fans can look forward to the release of the new game Star Wars Outlaws. In this video you can see 10 minutes of gameplay from the new title:
10:38
10 minutes of Star Wars Outlaws in a row: First gameplay makes Star Wars fantasies come true
Oppenheimer’s nightmare: How much energy is in our atomic bombs?
A much scarier question is whether we humans ourselves would be able to walk the ground beneath our feet, in colloquial terms zbomben away
.
Since the movie Oppenheimer
The story surrounding the development of the most terrible invention in human history is more familiar to many: the atomic bomb.
There are still more of them these days than any of us would like. Unfortunately, there is no tangible data on the size and yield of each nuclear bomb, making it difficult to make an accurate prediction.
Sea Statesman However, we know that there were around 12,512 nuclear warheads worldwide in 2023.
At most, a thought experiment can be started here: Assuming humanity detonates 12,500 nuclear warheads the size of Little Boy, that would be equivalent to one released explosion energy of 56 terajoules – pro Bombe.
The result: If you add up the explosive power of this number of bombs, you get only
17 zeros: 7 x 10 hoch 17 joules. The real explosive power of modern nuclear weapons will probably be significantly higher.
Worth knowing: If you want to read even more deeply about the topic of atomic bombs, you can follow this link to the knowledge magazine Follow Quarks.de. There you can read a very detailed article about atomic bombs and their possible effects on us and our planet. Here you can dive deeper than the length of this article allows.
So we can only hope that this thought experiment remains as fictional as the Death Star and that we will never know the real outcome.
